Liubov Durakova writes to you, whoever you may be. She sends you photographs from her time at an artist residency in Innsbruck, Austria in 2025. An image of a picturesque street leading to a church, past houses with flower boxes in the window frames, and, in the background, mountain peaks cutting against the clouds. Or her feet in trainers, as she sits on what appears to be a balcony, a cup of coffee beside her. A photograph of a woman laughing and looking away, holding a dandelion. Charming, cute. Nothing out of the ordinary. Until you read her notes accompanying this diary of everyday quiet.

Durakova is a Ukrainian photographer from Kharkiv, a city under near-constant bombardment since February 2022 and less than 40 kilometres from the Russian border. The photographs she made at the residency show none of this. What they show, instead, is the world as it appears to someone who is carrying something the camera cannot see.

In her project The Quiet Sound of War. A Sound That Can’t Be Turned Off Durakova is not documenting war as it is usually shown to us: not its destruction, not its dead, not the faces of those left behind. She documents what war does to the interior of a person. The way it rewires the ears. How it follows her across borders and into perfectly ordinary afternoons of peacetime. A chestnut falls from a tree. A plane passes overhead. An email arrives with a word that stops the breath for a moment — before the mind catches up, corrects itself, and carries on. These are the events that fill her diary. Small, mundane, almost embarrassing in their smallness. Yet, inseparable from what is now understood as acoustic terror.

LIUBOV DURAKOVA lives and works in Ukraine. She studied documentary filmmaking in Ukraine and Poland. In 2020, she began working with photography and received a mini-grant to open Malo Mesta, an experimental photo gallery in Uzhhorod, Ukraine. After the full-scale invasion in 2022, by using analog photography, field sound recordings, creating photo book layouts, and experimenting with video, Liubov Durakova explores life during war.

MIRJAM KOOIMAN is Senior Curator at Foam. She holds a BA in Art History and MA in Curating Arts & Culture from the University of Amsterdam. She has curated over 40 exhibitions and initiated international collaborations in Mexico, Nigeria, and Indonesia to foster a global dialogue on photography. From early darkroom experiments to the latest technological innovations, Kooiman explores photography’s evolving and enigmatic nature — and, through that lens, what it means to be a photography museum today.